“Human anger does not produce the righteousness God desires. So get rid of all the filth and evil in your lives, and humbly accept the word God has planted in your hearts, for it has the power to save your souls.” (James 1:20-21 NLT)
May I confess that emotional intimacy is very difficult for me. Whether I blame it on genetics, past hurts, or something else is irrelevant, it still makes it hard when my wife asks, “Why are you upset?” And while I know it frustrates her to hear me say, “I don’t know,” it frustrates me even more.
That’s why Andy Allan’s words in a Family Life devotional really spoke to me: “When it comes to emotional intimacy, I’ve found myself similarly limited. When my wife asks, ‘How are you feeling?’ my sentence starts with ‘I feel’ but usually ends with ‘…like taking a nap,’ ‘… eating Taco Bell,’ or ‘…punching the wall.’
Emotions serve as signposts pointing to deeper realities within us. Like when I’m mad as I wash dishes, muttering about how dirty our kitchen is and clanking plates at earsplitting levels. My wife knows I’m angry (the neighbors must know, too). When she asks, ‘What are you mad about?’ I’ll respond with ‘I’m not angry,’ in my best Clint Eastwood impression.
At some level, I know I’m angry but don’t want to admit it. But I need to see through my feelings to what caused them and go from there. If I pause to process, dirty dishes accuse me of failure. ‘If you were a better man,’ their crumbs shout, ‘we’d be clean by now.’ A dirty kitchen makes me feel like I don’t measure up, and I’m filled with anger at myself.
James 1:20 says, ‘the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God’ It produces quite the opposite, causing stress and turmoil from the kitchen to the bedroom and everywhere in between. Examining the belief underneath my anger, especially alongside my wife, has been so helpful. She doesn’t judge me by how quickly our plates are cleaned, and she reminds me God doesn’t either.”
As I age, gratefully it’s not as prevalent, but in my younger years I found myself angry and I genuinely didn’t understand why. Does that ever happen to you? At first I would try to brush it off and ignore it, but then I began to seek, with the Lord’s help, to process it in a healthy way. I’ve been able to share some with my wife, which is helpful, but the bottom line for me is that it’s a distraction from the enemy of my soul.
It’s easy for us to blame ourselves for not only our failures, but for the person we’ve become. In our mind and heart, we never quite measure up to that person we envisioned we’d one day be, or, perhaps, who we thought everyone else wanted or needed us to be. It’s a weight too heavy to carry when we keep piling on, not only our own expectations, but the expectations of others. It will literally kill us. It’s unbearable.
That’s why the Lord has made a way of escape for us. It’s called grace. It’s the free, undeserved, unmerited favor of God where He takes our sin, our shame, our unrealistic expectations, and places them on Himself. That’s what He did on the Cross and that’s where we need to leave them.
Are you angry? Join the club! We should be angry at the enemy for holding over our heads all the things the Lord died to free us of, including our sense of self-loathing for not being who we thought we should be. What comforts me, and I pray comforts you, is that we’re the apple of God’s eye just as we are. He made us the way we are for a very specific purpose: So, we’d learn to depend solely on Him, not on ourselves.
Food for thought.
Blessings, Ed 😊
Walking With Jesus 